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Four Humours presents vibrant and rare staging of Pinter one-acts with 'Other Places'

One for the Road.jpg

In 'One for the Road,' the first of four one-act plays in Harold Pinter's 'Other Places,' Cat Wilkinson, Jake Bartush and Max Canko, are the tortured prisoners of mikko, left, an interrogator in an unnamed totalitarian regime.
(Ruby Troyano)

En route to see “Other Places,” a quartet of one-act plays by Harold Pinter, lines from Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” kept whirling about my head. In “The Ladies Who Lunch,” the great wordsmith describes how women of a certain class twiddle away their days shopping, lunching, drinking and taking in “…a matinee, a Pinter play, perhaps a piece of Mahler’s” – the irony being that these vapid characters would approach such complex art, in theater or music, only to drop the names later at a perfectly perfect dinner party.

The works of British playwright Harold Pinter are, indeed, an acquired taste. Although he was a Nobel laureate, Pinter’s works have rarely reached levels of popularity of less influential 20th century writers, and his work virtually never appears on local stages.

That makes the current Four Humours Theater production of “Other Places,” a quartet of Pinter’s one-act plays, all the more exciting and vital. Presented at the new Dryades Theater, it is both a sharply intelligent production as well as a viscerally stimulating evening of drama.

The new space on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard is a reconstituted warehouse; the starkness of the setting puts a laser-sharp focus on the language of the plays and the images Pinter paints with his words. With each play, he can be simultaneously poetic and obscene, grotesquely morbid and acerbically funny.

If one had to name a common thread running through the pieces, each so different in theme and tone, it would be about human relationships and the struggles we have coming out of the darkness to, as E.M. Forster wrote, “only connect.”

The evening opens bluntly with “One for the Road,” directed by Ed Bishop, capturing Pinter in his extreme political garb. In it, a high-ranking apparatchik of an unspecified totalitarian regime interrogates three members of a family. We could be in a Soviet gulag or an office block in the Strand. The family’s crimes against the state remain equally unspoken, but in the hands of their captors, they have suffered grievously.

The inquisitor, Nicholas, is played with precision by mikko, who gives the character an eerie charm, the “good cop” whose ruse no one really believes. In this violent police state, he creates a veneer of civilized society in a Saville Row suit and a decanter of good whiskey. Meanwhile, upstairs, he’s been overseeing the rape of his subject’s wife and the beating of his 7-year-old son.

His victims have few lines and mostly respond in fear to the questions and comments of Nicholas. Jake Bartush is especially effective with a constrained performance, expressing all emotion through his eyes – defiant but defeated and, ultimately, completely crushed in spirit, mind and body.

Claudia Baumgarten, center, is a woman who awakes from a 29-yearlong coma to discover the changed world around her in 'A Kind of Alaska,' which also features Bob Edes and Kathryn Merris Scott.Ruby Troyano

Having been tortured and raped multiple times, Cat Wilkinson’s reaction is one of cold shock, which brings out Nicholas’ most violent tirade, hinting at the perils of any power that is compelled to force, while claiming “God is on our side.” Young Maxwell Canko plays their doomed son in a touching performance. Throughout, director Bishop maintains a coolness about the horrifying situation allowing the playwright to revel in his own Kafkaesque absurdity.

While remaining tartly acidic, the tone of the night is greatly lightened with the next piece, “Victoria Station,” a crazed dialogue between a harried taxi dispatcher and a loopy cabbie. As the dispatcher, Kathryn Merris Scott captures the spirit of loneliness so inherent in many of Pinter’s characters. As she attempts to persuade, cajole, even threaten, the driver to pick up a fare at London’s Victoria Station, the audience feels her building exasperation. The driver was played by Michael Martin at the performance I attended; Blake Buchert performs the role through the run.

Although the meager plot is the least developed of the four plays, director Kathryn Talbot and the actors find the right rhythm in their two-way radio conversation, drawing out the deadpan humor, while slowly unpeeling the surreal but disconcerting mood.

The night’s centerpiece, “Family Voices,” is an equally surreal showcase for Bartush who bursts from the playing area in and around the audience, unable to be contained. That level of energy reflects the scattered mind of the young man whose world we enter.

Through a series of letters to his mother (perhaps unwritten or unsent), he describes his life (real or imagined) in a large house, populated by a substitute family that he has created for himself. Meanwhile, his actual mother, played with a sense of boozy despair by Rebecca McNeill Meyers, laments his longtime disappearance from home. Bob Edes appears briefly as the disappointed father who died cursing his son’s name. Bartush’s character has escaped that world, creating a more glamorous one for himself, only to discover that in a Pinteresque world, dysfunctional family is a redundancy. Director Daniel Schubert-Skelly gives Bartush just enough rein to run freely, maintaining the electric spontaneity of the piece.

Admission: $12, $10 for students and seniors. Tickets may be ordered here. For more information or reservations, contact the company at 948.4167 or at fourhumourstheater@gmail.com.

The final act, “A Kind of Alaska,” directed by Andy Niemann, is the most poetic but also the most frustrating in that it leaves the audience wanting to know so much more in the end. Based loosely on several true cases near the end of World War I, Deborah, played with grace by Claudia Baumgarten, has awakened from a comatose state in which she has been for nearly three decades. Edes is at her side as the empathetic doctor who has revived her with a newly discovered drug. He must guide her back into the world of the living, a world she doesn’t know – now a middle-aged woman believing herself to still be a teen-aged girl.

Edes is particularly strong here, wrestling with the impossible task of what and how much to tell Deborah of what has transpired in the lives and world around her in the time that she has been asleep. Baumgarten’s reactions are as complex as would be expected – part Sleeping Beauty enamored by the Prince who has awakened her, part determined and petulant child. When her sister arrives, played by Merris Scott, she is forced to confront her new life by looking into a veritable mirror. The bewildered anger that comes out hints at familial issues that remain unresolved – time may heal everything, but for Deborah that same time hasn’t moved.

Too much, however, remains unresolved for the audience, which gets to share Deborah’s memories only in broken and fragmented glimpses. Even though there is a hopeful note in that Pinter shows an uncharacteristic compassion for his character here, her situation makes one want to withdraw and pull the covers back up over the head.

Four Humours Theater, under Michael Martin’s artistic direction, deserves commendation for tackling such works, taking local audiences to “Other Places” they rarely get to visit. These perplexing, funny, irritating and intriguing characters will live in your mind for some time after leaving the theater.